Friday, November 25th, 2005
Category: Business
A new Forbes article introduces Ajax’s benefits to business in a novel way: what’s offered by the A, the J, and the X.
… It’s Asynchronous! Writely‘s Sam Schillace:
“In terms of using asynchronous processing, the most significant is to send small updates back to the server from the editor as the user is working and to have the server send messages back to the editor,”
…It’s Javascript! Zimbra‘s Scott Dietzen: “JavaScript and Ajax allows Zimbra to do what we have always wanted to do”. Examples include: “Right click on a phone number to make a call with your soft phone”.
…It’s XML: GOffice‘s Kevin Warnock: “XML is useful because once a document is encoded into XML, it can be easily and reliably processed by many computer systems … Also, we can do part of the PDF creation process on the browser. This means we can scale our system to allow the creation of, literally, billions of PDF files.”
The article also suggests some caution on search engines and advertising opportunities.
“A complete AJAX application would be a mistake because search engines won’t be able to index it. And without a search engine, a site won’t be able to sell products.”
Search and Ajax is an interesting problem, and Backbase has some good advice on dealing with search engines (covered earlier).
Thursday, November 24th, 2005
Category: Ajax, Programming
The Microformats people have been talking about a minimalist subset of Ajax: Asychronous HTML and HTTP (AHAH). In AHAH, HTML snippets are injected directly onto existing elements. There’s also a tiny library function available that accepts two arguments: a page element and a URL for the HTML snippet.
In Kevin Marks’ demo, “change” is a run-of-the-mill div we’re going to update:
<div id=”change”>All this will pass</div>
And here’s how we turn “change” into a little star:
jah(‘star.html’,'change’);
Yes, innerHTML under the covers.
XML has no monopoly on Ajax (despite the name!), and a really, really, simple approach like AHAH might be the best thing for some Ajax applications.
Wednesday, November 23rd, 2005
Category: Usability
Over at AjaxInfo, Alexei White is discussing the risks of Ajax on the public web. The second of three postings looks at several cultural risks:
- Heterogenous culture and expectations.
- Users are not very trainable.
- Short attention span.
A few of the solutions include:
- Do affordance testing.
- Keep it lightweight.
- Ajax as value-added functionality.
- Liberal use of visual cues & affordances.
These are timely points, as it seems likely mainstream websites will be introducing Ajax features over the next tweleve months, e.g. Yahoo! Mail. Many of the risks are magnified when Ajax is used on the public web as opposed to internal systems. At the same time, everyday users on the public web also have more to gain from rich interaction done right.
Tuesday, November 22nd, 2005
Category: Builds, Flash, JavaScript
haXe is an open-source programming language supporting portable code across the different web platforms: Ajax, Flash, and server-side. Developer Nicolas Cannasse lists its capabilities:
- create Flash SWF files using Flash APIs for Players 6,7,8 and soon 8.5.
- generate Javascript code using Browser DHTML API, so you can create AJAX web applications.
- generate Neko sourcecode that can be used on the Server side or in standalone executable.
Each of theses platforms have their own API, but they share the same programming language and the same standard library, so if your classes are pure code (using no platform-specific API) then they can be compiled and used everywhere, depending on your needs.
To clarify: haXe isn’t a set of cross-platform widgets and libraries, but is instead a standard syntax for loops, data structures, and so on. Syntax is Java-like:
class Point {
public var x : Int;
public var y : Int;
public function new() {
this.x = 0;
this.y = 0;
}
}
Some Ajax apps have business logic (e.g. validation) inside the browser to speed things up, but also have to duplicate the logic in the server, for the sake of security. One way to manage the duplication is with server-side Javascript, but haXe might make a good alternative.
Category: Component, RichTextWidget
We recently covered the Dojo Rich Text Editor. Here’s FCKEditor, another widget that aims to be easy for users to work with and easy for developers to install and customise.
Support for keyboard shortcuts is impressive, but the browser gets in the way sometimes. I got burned a couple of times with Cmd-Left, which in most editors would normally jump to the start of the line, but in the browser (Firefox), it took me all the way back to the previous page!
Rich text editors make content maintenance a whole lot easier for most people and are familiar to just about anyone who’s used a word processor in the past couple of decades. It’s not always good to replicate desktop functionality, but it seems to make good sense here, at least for non-technical users.
Many people will immediately associate the UI style with MS Office, but funnily enough Office 12 makes a radical departure from the menus-and-toolbars paradigm. Are “Ajax Ribbons” the next big thing?
Monday, November 21st, 2005
Category: Examples
AOL takes a cautious step towards Ajax with its rebranded image manager,AOL Pictures (login required). It’s not exactly Ajax as we know it:
Most tools, including those used for photo editing and batch uploading, are not AJAX, but are Active X controls, meaning only users of Internet Explorer will be able to use them. And unlike Flickr, where anyone can browse any pictures that aren’t marked private, visitors to AOL Pictures can only see pics that have been explicitly shared with them.
So no Flickr-style mashups for now.
